Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankosaurus | Hacker News Reader

For me personally, robocalls outnumber legit call calls 10:1 these days.

Interestingly, most robocalls I get come from numbers that match the first 6 digits of my own phone number. I don't know why they do that, but it makes it easier to screen calls.

View on HN

100% of phone calls to my mobile device are robo calls. I get around 5 per day and (because of this) I never answer the phone. I actually tried to uninstall the dialer app but it seems to be fairly well-integrated into Android.

The humans in my life call via voip(ish) apps (Messenger and Facetime mostly).

Part of my monthly cell service cost is ostensibly for the line. Which I don't use and would prefer not to have all.

Aaah the beauty of "pay per airtime" fleecing by US phone companies

Meanwhile phone spammers pay 10x less for international minutes

I think very few non-prepaid mobile plans have metered airtime for donestic calls anymore.

True, but it doesn't matter, because it's not the caller paying the extra fee to call a mobile, you are.

The pricing structure incentives robocalls

They do that because it makes it harder for me to screen calls, I have kids at schools where landlines will have the same first 6 digits, if I get a call like that, I assume that it's a garbage call but I have to answer it in case I need to pick up a child or go to the doctor.

Add a contact in your address book with the school’s number(s)? Sure there is still a small chance of collision with the spammers’ fake numbers, but it should help.

My mobile gets an average of 3 robocalls a day, so I’m 100% whitelist at this point. If the caller’s number is not in my address book it gets ignored.

That requires you to actually know the number they'll be calling from though.

Also, assumes that it's not a local teacher calling from a cell phone.

I tell my kids that if they are calling me from someone else's phone or a school office phone I probably won't answer but they should be sure to leave a voicemail because I will listen to that.

They spoof Caller-ID to give an illusion of being local. They are generally out of area, calling from VOIP "boiler rooms".

I believe the assumption is that if the number is (apparently) on the same exchange as yours, it might be your neighbour, kid, etc. and you'd be more likely to pick up. Since most of those originate from a VOIP box in some low cost country, they do not necessarily know that this is unlikely to work in reality.

Me too. Car warranty calls, "Free Vacation/Hotel Scams", and a bunch of calls in Spanish.

I was in the same boat, so I started just leaving my phone silenced all of the time. I almost never get robocalls anymore. Interestingly, it seems like whenever I turn my ringer on because I'm expecting a call I get a robocall. It's probably just coincidence though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com